What are the key components of a successful crowdfunding campaign for hardware products?

Goro Kosaka / September, 2018

Description

Vufine was founded by Goro Kosaka in 2015. Goro is well versed in both the wearable market and myriad challenges facing a Silicon Valley hardware start­up, and in this video he is sharing his experience running two crowdfunding campaigns for Vufine.

Video Transcript:

What are the key components of a successful crowdfunding campaign for hardware products?

Once again, this only applies to hardware crowdfunding. I think crowdfunding is better for software or games but hardware you need to spend a lot of money on development. You have to pass the test. You have to comply with all the regulations in the country. You have to have the manufacturing.

It’s not ideal for crowdfunding, but you have to have your product 95% ready when you go into crowdfunding, so you have the product ready to ship in three months instead of having people wait one year or one and a half years. Because the risk of doing crowdfunding is that you’re telling everyone the idea of your product and also the potential market. There are cases like somebody who did a very good crowdfunding campaign but failed to deliver the product on time. While they’re trying to finish the project some small company from China comes up with the same product but at a lower price and totally kills your business. You have to have a product ready. Enough funding to finish production and a nice-looking video.

To promote our crowdfunding campaign, we did tradeshows and Facebook Ads. We also did Google advertisements and search ads. But the kind of product we were doing is not something you search and look for in Google, so we did more targeted ads. Targeting people who fly drones, use action cameras and who are early adopters. The great thing about Facebook ads is that you can see the results like almost in real time so you can keep changing and adjusting dynamically. Because you only have like a one month window while you’re doing the crowdfunding campaign so you don’t want to put too much money in the wrong audience.